An influential songwriter and proto-metal guitar virtuoso, Michael Schenker played with hard rock legends Scorpions and UFO before finding success as a solo artist in the late 1970s with the Michael Schenker Group. With his signature half-black, half-white Gibson Flying V, Schenker spent the next four decades at the fore of the melodic hard rock scene, releasing a string of acclaimed solo albums while occasionally rejoining UFO both as a player and a producer.